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Friday, December 08, 2006

Why Is America Unwilling to Invest In High Quality Teaching?

High quality teachers that students duly deserve are not cheep, but you can't get better quality by paying teachers less than they get now. Like Iraq, a "stay-the-course" strategy only gets you more of the same.

It’s impossible to brand No Child Left Behind as a failure, because its agenda has never been carried out. The law was supposed to remake schools that serve poor and minority students by breaking with the age-old practice of staffing those schools with poorly trained and poorly educated teachers. States were supposed to provide students with highly qualified teachers in all core courses by the beginning of the current academic year. That didn’t happen.

Trouble is there is a gigantic gap between what people are willing to pay teachers, who do valuable work every day, and what others earn for less valuable work. Take for example how much people get paid to hit baseballs.

The deal, according to the Associated Press, includes performance bonuses that could push it to $20 million.

What if Barry Bonds and people like him - wage earners that make more than say five million a ear - would take his 16 million and use it to pay 15 new teachers a million bucks apiece and keep the other million for himself? Might that not attract better teachers for schools that deserve them?